On Registers, Consilience, and Why I Write the Way I Do
Mine is the kind of mind that lives in close imaginative proximity to other people. Not just sympathetic proximity, the polite acknowledgment that others have inner lives, but something more absorptive than that. You don't just understand that someone thinks differently than you do. You think with them, inside their framework, in their register, until their way of moving through the world becomes temporarily but genuinely yours. You carry their voice back with you when you leave.
For most of my life, I experienced this as a liability.
It showed up everywhere. My handwriting cycled through three or four distinct styles depending on what I was reading or who I'd been talking to. My speaking voice shifted registers mid-conversation. My writing — when I attempted it, which wasn't often — would start in one mode and finish in another after having detoured through two or three others. I avoided writing for most of my adult life, outside of what work or school required, because the product always felt unruly, inconsistent, somehow not fully mine even when it was entirely mine.
I have ADHD. That's part of the explanation, though not all of it. The fuller explanation is that I am someone who empathizes with many different people (what they think, how they feel, the way they express themselves) so completely that I can't help but experience them, and my connection to them, as facets of who I am. That is not a disjointed or ill-fitting identity. It is not, as my more judgmental internal voice used to suggest, anything like schizophrenia. It is an ability that gets systematically misread as non-conformity in systems designed for a different kind of user.
It has taken the better part of a decade to recognize that most of what I thought of as my flaws were something closer to natural resources — not to be extracted and monetized, but to be refined for my own flourishing and, eventually, for something larger than myself. The register-shifting that looked like inconsistency turns out to be range. The inability to commit to a single discipline — my fascination with patterns and cross-domain synthesis, the way economics kept pulling me toward psychology, which pulled me toward neuroscience, which pulled me toward moral philosophy — turns out to be something with a name: consilience.
Consilience is what happens when multiple independent streams of evidence, beginning from different priors, arrive at the same conclusion. In philosophy of science it is understood that this convergence provides stronger grounds for belief than any single airtight argument constructed within one discipline's assumptions. The streams don't just confirm each other. They triangulate something that none of them could have located alone.
That is what you will find here. Not the certainty of economics from an economist, or psychology from a psychologist, or political science from a political scientist. What you will find is the consilience of economics read through psychology, neuroscience, political science, sociology, anthropology, and moral philosophy — all of them pointing toward the same structural diagnosis, approached from different directions, arriving together.
I write in two registers, and I want you to know that this is deliberate.
Some pieces — the What I Wish the Left Would Learn Before the Midterms series, for instance — are written in the voice of a loving cousin. Close, familiar, a little sardonic, plain-spoken. That voice is trying to do a specific thing: to make contact with people who are not already convinced, who might be persuadable if the argument doesn't feel like a lecture. Other pieces — Seeing Clearly, Why We Never Seem to Agree on Economics — are written from a more analytical perspective. Not academic, because I am not an academician and I don't pretend to the false neutrality that academic register sometimes performs. I have a perspective. That should be obvious to anyone who has read more than two paragraphs of anything I've written. But I try, in the analytical pieces, to present the strongest version of ideas I disagree with before explaining why I disagree with them. That discipline matters to me. It is the minimum condition for honest argument.
Both registers are in service of the same project: an argument that most of what we experience as discrete, unrelated social problems — economic precarity, political polarization, institutional distrust, the collapse of civic dignity — are in fact symptoms of a single structural failure. That the diagnosis points toward collective agency as both the cause of our difficulty and the only available cure.
This is the invitation, then: to explore that argument with me, with epistemic humility on both our parts. I am not asking you to agree. I am asking you to stay with uncertainty long enough that your capacity to recognize the dignity of others — and the systems that diminish it — has room to expand. That is what I am trying to do here. To leave the world, however incrementally, more capable of seeing itself clearly.
That seems worth the discomfort of learning to write.